Program Description

Mentorship programs can empower teams to bridge silos that contribute to inefficiency, wasted funds, and failed communication within organizations. A healthy workplace culture exists because of intentional actions by leaders and teams. This presentation will focus on the benefits of using mentorship as a collaborative tool to increase capacity for knowledge sharing, improve communications among cross functional teams, increase engagement, and create shared language and plans that help mitigate and manage conflict before they arise. Additionally, participants will discuss ideas to persuade leaders to establish mentorship programs. Finally, the presentation will include ideas participants can use to incorporate informal or formal mentoring into their performance management process and goals setting for team members.

Sponsored by: Robert Half

Speaker Bio

Kimberly Cooper Thomas, JD, Founder and Chief Collaboration Officer of Sister In The Shadow Consulting LLC, helps supporters of college bound students make sense of college infrastructures and processes so they can equip their students to navigate college and connect to meaningful resources before the students arrive on campus. Her body of work demonstrates her commitment to using collaboration and mentorship to increase engagement, knowledge transfers, role clarity, belongingness, and workplace satisfaction. Kimberly has over twelve years of work experience in higher education students affairs leadership. Her responsibilities have included leading cross-functional teams, coaching professionals, mentoring students and colleagues, risk management, compliance, support initiatives for student athletes, and supporting initiatives that promote student success and staff development.

As a practicing lawyer and student affairs administrator, Kimberly has used mentorship to learn about new systems she needed to navigate and to help others with personal and professional development. Moreover, Kimberly has presented at faculty and student workshops, served as a student leadership council advisor, an adjunct instructor, a collaborative campus partner, and an engaging presenter for student leadership trainings, faculty trainings, and national professional conferences. Additionally, Kimberly created and facilitated the inaugural mentorship program for EPB in Chattanooga, TN that resulted in a Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 65 indicating most participants were enthusiastic about the program and likely to recommend it to others. Kimberly is an advocate for implementing collaboration and mentorship to engage highly productive teams and a healthy workplace culture where teams thrive, individually and collectively.

Recertification Credits

SHRM 1.0; HRCI 1.0 (pending)

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